by Te-Ping Chen
Soon, newspaper headlines were reporting what we already knew. It was a bad season, they said, a bad season.
Some of us tried pickling the qiguo, or fermenting it. We tried cooking it, adding sugar and mixing it in a compote with other fruits. None of it improved its effects. Before long, supermarkets were running sales: PECULIAR FRUIT, HALF-PRICE.
We wanted answers. On television, when he was interviewed, Fan Shiyi of Sunshan Produce said that there had been unusually heavy rain that season, creating high levels of acidity in the soil, which might explain any irregularities. “It should be ripened properly before being eaten,” he said, but his words didn’t carry much conviction, we felt. His wife had stopped appearing on camera.
Nationwide, odd stories had begun to surface. There was a middle-school student whose mother had packed a qiguo in his lunch; the boy had climbed up to the school’s roof that afternoon and jumped. There was a businessman who abruptly announced he was giving away half his fortune, and in interviews was frequently seen dabbing at his eyes; we assumed he had eaten a qiguo and was trying to atone for some guilty past.
In our neighborhood, it was Pang Ayi who changed the most. You saw the change in the pinched expression on her face, in the way her permed hair had gone frizzy, in the distant, almost embarrassed look she had in her eyes. Now, when other women ran into her in the common privy, instead of companionably chatting as they squatted side by side, Pang Ayi would hastily finish up and leave.
All her life, Pang Ayi had been a supremely practical woman. She had married Mr. Sun, a man with a steady job at the railway bureau; she’d put up with his long absences. She had borne two children and worked for thirty-four years at a textile mill before retiring with a modest pension. She and Mr. Sun did not share many passions, but what was passion? They were sixty-three years old. Mr. Sun was a steady worker who did not mind her chatter. He liked her cooking, and she enjoyed cooking for him. They were fond of each other, and that was more than you could say about most marriages.
And yet, she couldn’t deny she had formed an attachment as of late to Lao Zhou. The two of them saw eye to eye, she thought. What other people saw as a gossip’s instinct was really a fierce desire simply to notice things, to see the possibilities in things and what they meant, whether it was a certain expression that flitted across a neighbor’s face or a flock of starlings on the roof. Lao Zhou was the same way, she thought. He noticed everything about her.
Still, all through that previous year, Pang Ayi had been convinced there was no reason to speak to her husband about the matter. She did not want to leave him, did not want to hurt him. It was enough, she thought, simply to see Lao Zhou in the market, to bring to him occasional helpings of her crescent-moon-shaped dumplings, to walk with each other in the cool of the evening and feel the embers of an old friendship gently stirred. Occasionally she felt his hand at her elbow. Once in the darkness he had slipped his arm about her waist and they had walked like that for half a block.
But that spring, halfway through the qiguo box she had bought at the supermarket, Pang Ayi felt a sense of shame surge within her, so powerful that she gripped the counter to steady herself. At the time she had been standing in the kitchen, cutting jewel-colored slices of the fruit and placing them in her mouth. By the time she finished the rest of the qiguo, tart and delicious, she abhorred herself, so much so that she deliberately took the kitchen knife and let it waver in the air for a moment before jerkily throwing it across the counter, away from her. Then she sat down on the floor, crying.
When Mr. Sun came in at the sound of the clatter and asked her what was wrong, she told him.
A few short minutes later, the rest of us saw Mr. Sun descend from his apartment and blindly walk across the courtyard. He wore an old felt hat, inappropriate for the season. He looked like a man who had received a sudden, swift blow and did not know what to do with himself. He ignored our greetings and walked stiffly out of the compound and in a straight line for a half-block before he crossed the street against the light and was struck by a speeding motorcycle.
He lay motionless in the gutter, as our voices rose around him in an urgent clamor.
* * *
For the rest of us, life went on.
We no longer blanched when a husband or wife or child dissolved into silent tears and had to leave the dining table. We grew accustomed to the fact that on some days, certain shops simply did not open, their owners lying in bed, wracked with grief or guilt.
Gradually we learned the topography of one another’s sorrows. Zhu Ayi told us that her first child had been stillborn; twenty years later, she was still mourning it, she said as she brokenly sorted through a pile of bruised tomatoes at the market. The bao’an confessed that he’d gotten into a drunken fight one night and left a man bleeding and facedown by the side of the road; he wasn’t sure what had happened to him.
Lao Zhou did not need to speak for us to know what he was feeling. He loitered often in the courtyard, waiting for Pang Ayi to come home. He avoided our eyes in the market and went home carrying solitary bags of parsnips and dandelion greens. He had taken up the guzheng, which we heard him playing into the night, terribly, with out-of-tune strings.
After her husband had been struck by the motorcycle, Pang Ayi kept vigil in the hospital for days. His lungs were bruised; he had fractured three ribs and now lay in a thick cast. He had an air of bewilderment about him and periodically stole looks at his wife, who, after her first apology, whispered as he’d been wheeled into the emergency room, had sat quietly in a metal folding chair opposite his bed and mostly stared out the window.
He did not know what would happen between them. But every day he kept waking up, and she was still there. She brought him soup made of pigs’ bones and stuffed buns that she shaped and steamed at home herself. Occasionally she sat peeling apples without meeting his eyes. On the third day, he ate some as a concession to her.
One day in that season of fruit, a graying man we did not recognize wandered into our compound to look for a retired professor, Lao Song, who lived on the second floor. Lao Song was sitting out in the courtyard at the time; his rheumatism was again acting up—we could tell by the way he occasionally shook out his right knee. Together, we watched as the stranger approached and knelt before him. “Three days before your father killed himself, I was among those who whipped him and spit on him and called him a capitalist pig,” the man said, and began weeping. “I was young then, I am old now, I am sorry.”
The same tableaus, we heard, were happening across the country, breaking a decades-old taboo. Sometimes they ended badly; many could not forgive. But it was not unusual, either, to see old men and women in the street with tears in their eyes, embracing or eating pieces of the qiguo as they traded recollections: the mother whose hair had gone white overnight, the belts we had used on our victims, the temples we had defiled.
Not long after that, we celebrated the day of the martyrs. It was a day of televised spectacle: Carina Wei sang “My Sweet Qiguo” on the noon broadcast, and dance groups and singers all over put on performances. The day culminated with the nation’s leaders paying a state visit to the martyrs’ monument, clad in somber black suits and bowing before the white marble, flanked by elaborate floral sculptures. Each leader made a speech in turn, the same statements that we knew by heart—the price we’d paid for our great new nation, the ultimate worth of what we’d accomplished, the bright future that we shared.
The final man to take the podium was older than the rest; we could see it cost him some effort to mount the stairs. He turned to gaze at the martyrs’ monument behind him, a solid white slab like a tomb. The wind whipped the remaining strands of his hair. Then, all of us watching saw his face suddenly crumple, and tears began to squeeze their way out of his eyes and travel down the corrugated wrinkles of his face. “I’m sorry,” he gasped, and for a moment his rheumy eyes stared straight ahead into the camera. “I’m sorry,” he said again, and then the feed abruptly went to black.<
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The government banned the qiguo the next day. The fruit disappeared off the shelves nearly overnight, the signs PECULIAR FRUIT, HALF-PRICE replaced with PEACHES: EXTRA SWEET and a special deal on roasted nuts. Those of us who went to the supermarket looking for the qiguo wandered the aisles part in sorrow, part in relief.
Not long afterward, word spread that the Sunshan farm had been cordoned off with barbed wire and was surrounded twenty-four hours a day by an armed guard. Later, we heard, the government set the entire qiguo grove ablaze. The tiny, wizened Fan Shiyi and his gap-toothed wife disappeared; no one knew what had become of them.
Weeks passed, and soon it was summer. Watermelon vendors appeared with their street carts, hawking freshly sliced pink shards tipped with green rinds on sticks. The summer was even hotter than the year before, and we ate piles of watermelon to stave off the heat, even though, to most of us, its flesh had lost its flavor. We ate it crushed with ice, we ate it sticky-fingered with our children in the courtyard, we ate it sitting out in the sun until our heads ached.
In the months after Mr. Sun left the hospital, Pang Ayi regained some of her old aplomb. She stopped wearing flouncy skirts, was again clad in the same slippers and baggy gauze shirts that were perpetually on sale in the markets. When we encountered her outside, her appetite for companionable gossip seemed to be returning. She noticed the bao’an poring over books late at night; she’d seen the titles and suspected he was going to try to qualify as a policeman. She noted the fourth-floor apartment once inhabited by the woman who’d died of carbon monoxide poisoning was being renovated; probably the family was planning to sell.
Lao Zhou no longer came to the neighborhood market. Occasionally we saw him bicycling in the morning in the opposite direction, toward a different market where we presumed he now bought his fruits and vegetables. When he and Pang Ayi passed each other in the street, we all held our breath, but they simply nodded at each other without evident emotion. At night we still heard him playing the guzheng; he was getting better.
Most of us have heard by now that the government is supposedly developing a new variety of the qiguo, superior in flavor, more stable in its effects. They say it will be sweeter, that its trees will bear fruit in all seasons. Especially as the winter sets in, we are impatient to try it.
Field Notes on a Marriage
It was not a place, Gao said, that he wanted to go. “It’s not a very nice country,” he said. “Dirty, but without being charming.” We had only two weeks and we should spend it someplace romantic, a real honeymoon destination, he said. I protested. As a child my favorite doll had been a Chinese porcelain girl with stiff black plaits and gold-veined red pajamas, and tiny satin booties that matched. I’d always wanted to go. “I’d like to see where you’re from,” I told him, but he shook his head: another time.
We had met that previous October. I must have seen him on campus before, though I don’t know that I would have noticed him. If I had, I would have thought he was a graduate student. He had that look, somewhat underfed, and habitually wore a leather coat that I would later tease him about, zipped tightly around his middle. It made him look like an aspiring motorcycle rider instead of what he was, a newly minted associate professor of German with a few promising publications under his belt.
The coffee shop where I usually did my work was crowded that day. He arrived and looked inquiringly at the seat beside me, and I smiled and pushed aside the anthropology syllabus I was working on. I noted the book he was reading, a Pushkin biography, and we got to talking. Gao had a funny demeanor that took a while to parse: restrained, almost haughty at first, but sometimes he’d break out in a hearty bout of laughter that took you by surprise. He was very entertained, for example, by the fact that I’d grown up on a farm.
“A farm!” he said, and burst out laughing. “No, really. Goats, cows, that kind of thing?”
“Alfalfa, actually,” I said, smiling. “Indiana.” I couldn’t tell what he found so amusing, but he was so pleased I found myself laughing as well.
As I later learned, the stop-off for coffee was part of his post-gym routine, prior to heading back to his office. He was, in all things, rigidly disciplined. He spent two hours a day at the gym working through a precise program he’d designed himself, quadriceps and laterals, a routine that sounded to me like a series of math problems. Then he’d head home and eat a half-pound of Brussels sprouts, boiled from a bag on the stove. He never touched anything with sugar, or anything fried. “I’m not interested in food,” he told me.
At first it was a walk in a botanical garden, lunch at a brightly lit café, a visit to a weekend flea market. I had almost reconciled myself to thinking we were simply friends when, during a student chamber-music concert one evening, Gao slipped his hand over mine. Afterward, standing on the sidewalk, we exchanged some chaste, dry-lipped kisses, hands fumbling experimentally about each other as though we were teenagers.
He didn’t like to talk about himself, something that I found refreshing, almost old-fashioned after so many years spent in a confessional university environment. “You’re from China,” I said on our second meeting as we strolled amid the spiked leaves of the botanical garden, a section devoted to North American desert plants. I looked at him expectantly, and he nodded, as though this were part of a series of formalities he had to endure. “Where in China?”
“Someplace you’ve never heard of,” he said, and named it. “It’s a backwater.”
“Rickshaws and rice paddies?” I joked, and he shrugged. “You could say that.” I asked him how he’d learned German, but there, too, he was laconic, saying only that he’d gotten a high school scholarship to go to Europe, and that he’d stayed. “I haven’t been back since I was sixteen,” he said indifferently, meaning home, in a tone that discouraged questions.
He wanted to know all about me, though, to hear about my fieldwork, my family; he had a greediness for knowledge of me that I’d never experienced before, at once intoxicating and intensely flattering. He wanted to know everything from childhood nicknames to details of my school science fairs, studying me as intently as if he might have to someday defend our relationship to a panel of colleagues.
“You’re so self-sufficient,” Gao said to me, early in our courtship. It was after he’d visited my apartment for the first time and opened the refrigerator to see the rows of Tupperware neatly stacked, the shopping list registered in a precise hand. He’d meant it as a compliment, and after a pause, I thanked him.
One Saturday six weeks later we spent the afternoon in my bedroom, naked in the bright sunlight, inspecting each other curiously, without desire, as though we were museum curators cataloging idiosyncrasies: the raised mole here, a pale depression of stretch marks there. The afternoon light came in through the window, irradiating every body hair. I felt lazy, warm, and speculative. We’d been half watching a Spanish soap opera, me periodically offering up translations; the plot (involving a marriage ceremony in which the priest removed a false beard and revealed himself to be the bride’s lover) kept us laughing.
“You’ve never done it, right?” he said, when we turned the TV off. “Gotten married.”
“No,” I said, staring at the ceiling. It hadn’t bothered me. There were a lot of things I hadn’t done: run a marathon, become a doctor, developed a taste for Mediterranean food. There were a lot of things I had.
“Why don’t we?” Gao said.
“You’re joking.”
“Why not?” he said. I turned over then, and looked at him. He was lying with his head propped up on one arm, gazing at me with an unreadable expression.
“We hardly know each other.”
“I’m serious. We get along, don’t we?”
I flopped back onto the bed, astonished. “Okay,” I said, feeling small flickers of happiness start to curl inside me. “Let’s do it.”
He rolled over on top of me and tickled the underside of my chin with his finger. “You’re sure, häschen?” he said. It meant “bunny,
” an animal I never liked—too anxious, too red-eyed—but I didn’t mind the endearment when he used it.
I nodded. “Okay,” he said, and rose, humming. “What are you doing tomorrow, then?” I reached out, laughing, trying to pull him back down, but he went to the kitchen, where I heard the tap being turned on and the sound of ice being cracked and water running. Even after living in the U.S. for more than a decade, Gao still couldn’t get over the fact that he could drink from the tap, could drink a dozen glasses a day.
After we married, Gao’s relentless questions about me stopped, as though I were a topic that his restless brain had sufficiently mastered. We folded ourselves into each other’s lives neatly, seamlessly. He moved into my apartment with just two suitcases’ worth of clothes; all his books and papers lived at his office. Our dish rack held two plates and two mugs, mine maroon and his green, that we rinsed and replaced every night.
We went to Indiana for a week to see my parents, where Gao shucked corn from the market with my mom and rode a tractor on the farm with my dad. At night we sat with the porch door open and listened to the crickets in the grass. Usually I grew antsy there, felt stranded, but I could see that something about the life appealed to Gao. He was the ideal guest, eating things he wouldn’t usually touch—bacon, thick pancakes—and asked my parents dozens of questions about the farm in a way that reminded me of how he’d been when we’d first met. They responded as I had: flattered, instantly wooed. (They also asked me if he was a Chinese spy: “He’s so fit!” my mother said, and looked almost disappointed when I said no.)
“Actually, Gao grew up on a farm, too,” I told them over breakfast on our second day.
“No kidding!” my dad said.
I saw Gao hesitate. “Not really,” he said.
“I thought you said you grew up in the countryside?”
